Sometimes you can get bored following the same old recipes, sticking to the same old instructions, obeying every word of the cookery book as if it was law. Sometimes wouldn’t it be nice to break free, go wild, and create some mad new invention?

The risk, of course, is that your mad new invention will taste like wet pants. And it will be so awful that it somehow becomes famous, and they’ll name it after you, and your name will forever be associated with the taste of wet pants. This is the risk that all pioneers must take.

Fortunately, if you master a few simple concepts and skills, you stand a much better chance of creating something that not only doesn’t taste of wet pants, but doesn’t taste like dry pants either, or, for that matter, any kind of undergarment. In fact, it’ll taste good!

Find A Good Base

Once you know how to make a few simple dishes, you can experiment with them. Pizzas are good for this- if you can make a decent pizza base, or a pie crust you can pile pretty much anything you like into the filling or topping and it will probably hold together. The same is true of pancakes- a stack of pancakes with a savoury topping makes for a great, quick meal that leaves plenty of room for trying new flavours.

You can go a step further if you know a basic chicken curry or chili recipe. Once you know how to whip up a decent curry sauce you can start experimenting with different spices, vegetables and meats to create a host of different dishes.

Learn Which Combinations Work

Once you’ve got a good base to work from you need to find a way to figure out which flavours work together. This leaves you plenty of room to experiment with small quantities, but there are a few staples that always seem to work. Lemon and tarragon always work well with chicken. Apple and pork always go together. Lime and shrimp is another time honoured classic.

If you know which flavours work, try experimenting with similar flavours. For instance, if apple and pork go together, will apricot and pork go together? (Yes and it’s delicious.) Have a read through the recipe books to see what surprising flavour combinations can be transplanted elsewhere. For instance, dark chocolate is a popular ingredient in chilli con Carne. However, it can also work well in a beef casserole.

Substitutions

Finally, the easiest way to create a new dish is to simply switch out some of the ingredients to create new flavours. A good way to do this is switching the meats around- switch pork sausages out for beef sausages. Turn your chick recipes into turkey recipes.

If a dish requires plenty of potato, see if it would work with sweet potato instead, or even butternut squash. The more you experiment, the better an idea you’ll get for what works. The more you know what works, the more outlandish you can afford to get with your experimenting. Before you know it, you’ll be Hestol Blumenthalling it up with bacon and egg ice cream.

These cupcakes are much easier to make than the design would suggest. Using an edible icing sheet with a lace print design enables you to incorporate fancy prints into your desserts with little effort and time.

Tools & Ingredients

Cupcakes

Buttercream Icing

Piping Bag (plastic disposable)

Fondant

Icing Sheet with Lace Print Design

Small flower gum paste cutter

Sugar Pearls

Rolling Pin

Heart cookie cutter

Piping Gel

Plastic mat or cutting board

Shortening

Ball tool

Steps

Roll out fondant to 1/16” thickness on a greased mat/cutting board.

Apply a thin coat of piping gel over the area where you are applying the print.

Peel the plastic backing off the icing sheet and apply to the area where you applied the gel. Rub back and forth on top of the icing sheet to make it adhere.

Place the heart cookie cutter over the area of the print you want included in your cut-out. Be sure to press firmly all around the sides of the cookie cutter to cut all the way through the icing sheet and fondant. Wiggle the cookie cutter slightly back and forth to release the cut area from the rest of the fondant.

Set the cut heart aside to dry.

Roll out a small amount of pink fondant to 1/16” thick. Use the gum paste flower cutter to cut out 3 flowers for each heart. Using the ball tool, press into the center of the flower to create a spot for the sugar pearl.

Apply a tiny bit of piping gel to the center of each flower and stick a sugar pearl in the middle. Use a little more gel to adhere the flowers along the side of the heart cut-out.

Cut a hole on the pointy end of the disposable cake decorating bag. Fill bag 2/3 full with pink icing. Pipe buttercream icing on the cupcake, beginning with the outside and moving in a circular motion around the cupcake. (It will resemble the look of a soft-serve ice cream cone).

Stick the heart cut-out into the fresh icing. (If you let the icing harden up, the heart won’t stick).

It’s best to make all the heart cut-outs in advance and then you will be able to quickly put the cupcakes together as you ice them. The sugar pearls are sold in Michael’s Craft Stores, online cake decorating stores and sometimes you’ll find them in gourmet stores. If you can’t find them, you can substitute pearl tapioca or simply pipe a white dot in the center of the flower.

You can use any kind of cake decorating bag, but I use the disposable ones so that I can just cut a hole and throw the bag out when I’m done. If you have plastic or linen cake decorating bags, then just use a large round tip to pipe the icing.

Icing sheets taste good and are so easy to incorporate into cupcake designs and other desserts. If you had to pipe the lace pattern, you’d be spending hours doing what takes mere minutes to do with these valentine cupcakes.

Attached Images:

License: Image author owned

Theresa Happe is a cake decorator and fan of www.IcingImages.com where you can find icing sheets and a wide selection of great prints to use with them, including this lacy pattern.

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Learn About Life

With many people strongly believing that schools should be doing more to teach life skills rather than just “teaching to the test” across a plethora of subjects, it is strange that the debate around school cookery lessons is such a hot one. Surely cooking is one of the very best life skills we can all learn from a young age. Unless we adopt a “raw food” type of diet when we reach adulthood, the chances are that we’ll all need to have some culinary skills to get through life.

Now that we know this, just what is the problem many have with school cooking classes?

Not a Lesson

The biggest problem many have is that the children in schools aren’t really learning anything. Red tape and “Health and Safety” tends to mean that certain ingredients or practices aren’t allowed, or won’t be risked, in a number of schools, despite the potential benefits on offer.

Another issue that overshadows these lessons is that there generally isn’t actually a great deal of cooking that goes on. The focus might be on making dough, or getting a cake mixture correct, not on practical advice and teachings that could actually prove crucial in the years to come. Many people are fortunate enough to pick up bits and pieces from their parents in order to hone their own cooking skills, but what about those who don’t? There is an argument that, despite growing concern in developed countries around the world surrounding obesity and health problems caused by poor diet, education systems are doing little more that dooming children to a life of microwave meals and convenience foods.

People holding this point of view feel that more time could be spent in schools on more traditional academic lessons, although the best alternative would perhaps be physical education, so that the obesity and health issue can be dealt with.

Getting Familiar

In contrast, many argue that, regardless of what is actually made during a cookery class – and whether or not it is eaten – the familiarity that children can gain of the kitchen and how different things are used and operated can prove invaluable.

In a one or two hour lesson, someone with an interest in food isn’t going to turn into a young Jamie Oliver, however they could definitely pick up enough to begin to hone their skills. After all, isn’t schooling all about preparing youngsters for later life?

This article was written by Videojug. Videojug are a leading video content website, featuring thousands of professionally produced pieces of helpful video content. Videojug can help teach all of the valuable life skills that school cookery lessons didn’t, including how to make a meringue recipe.

I think I’m gearing up for another baking session this weekend. I don’t know why I’ve become so interested in baking in the last couple of weeks, but my husband is loving it.

Earlier this week I found a few more recipes that I’d like to try making this weekend. One of them is the Cinnamon Swirl Brioche that I mentioned a few days ago, and the rest are cookies.

In particular I plan on making three types of cookies this weekend.

One cookie is called a Sugar Crackle Gingerbread Cookie. It’s not a gingerbread man cookie it’s a round cookie and it looks delicious. I love gingersnaps and other types of ginger cookies and the recipe for this cookie sounds delicious. The second cookie recipe that I’d like to try is a recipe that I found on Southern Plate called “Dishpan Cookies”. The cookies are made with oatmeal and cornflakes and they look like huge old fashioned oatmeal cookies.

The last cookie recipe that I plan to make is “Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies”. Mmmmm Decadent sounding. I love nothing more than chocolate and these cookies look delicious.

I think my house is going to smell fantastic again this weekend. Oh and I’m sure everything will be covered in flour again too – including my danze faucet! That’s the one thing I don’t like about cooking and baking – the cleaning or clean up.

We can’t really afford to buy a lot of Christmas presents for our family this year, but since I’m on a baking spree (and we have most of the ingredients I’m using here at home already so it’s not costing much) maybe I’ll make up some “home made” presents. That might work.

Perhaps it’s the spirit of the season, or maybe it’s all of the emails that I’ve been getting lately with interesting sounding recipes, but I’ve been on a baking spree in the last week and a half.

It started the weekend before last when I had the urge to make french toast. Not just any french toast. No … It had to be the kind of french toast that’s made with cinnamon swirl brioche. I had a craving – obviously.

At first I just tried to go out and buy a cinnamon swirl brioche or some kind of cinnamon swirl bread. I looked in a few grocery stores and some local bakeries without any luck. Would you believe that the best I could find was a commercial brand of Cinnamon raisin bread? Finally I decided to make my own. Of course I didn’t have any luck finding a cinnamon brioche recipe that I liked … somehow I got side tracked and discovered cinnamon babka and cinnamon chocolate babka recipes and oh it was on! Before I knew it my kitchen counter was covered in mixing bowls, flour and the air smelled of yeast and spices.

Grating the chocolate for the cinnamon chocolate babka was uh .. interesting … I tried a hand grater at first and well … that would have taken two hours. So … out came my Braun all in one food processor. You know … the machine I should have been using all all long to mix my double batches of dough? Eventually, with my husbands help, I got enough of the dark chocolate grated for the Cinnamon Chocolate babka.

I think it took about 7 hours to make two Cinnamon babkas and two cinnamon chocolate babkas that evening. Half the time was of course waiting for the bread dough to rise, but the rest was mixing, and figuring out how to grate all the chocolate and so on. I also hadn’t used my food processor for a long time so that took some time between cleaning it for use and figuring out which attachment to use.

You know what the sad part is about the whole experience? I didn’t really like the babkas – not initially at least. The bread was too dense and heavy, for my tastes anyway. I didn’t even end up using any of it to make the french toast that had initiated the whole idea in the first place. I ended up using the commercial cinnamon raisin bread that I bought in the grocery store – which was ok, but not the delicious experience I’d been anticipating. I’ve now found what seems to be the perfect cinnamon Brioche recipe for making a cinnamon swirl bread – perhaps I’ll try making that this coming weekend.

My husband took one of each of the Babkas to work to share with the nurses and his other co-workers in the day surgery recovery room. I hear they enjoyed them. Oh and at least with two less loaves of high calorie desert bread in the house I know I won’t be looking for the best fat burners any time soon!

Then … this past weekend I came across some tasty looking recipes for Zucchini bread. My husband had found a great deal on zucchini in the grocery store – a bag with 12 or so medium zucchini in it for $1.49! Yes they were still fresh! I had been going to grate them and package them up to freeze so that I could eventually add them to pasta sauces and other recipes. Well .. I ended up making four loaves of Zucchini bread and one Chocolate Zucchini cake. Yummy! Plus I still have about five cups of grated Zucchini left so I can either use that in dinner recipes or make more zucchini bread with it next year.

I also made two dozen carrot muffins from a packaged mix the same day that I made all those zucchini loaves. Chris took one Zucchini loaf to work, but we still have three, plus the cake and muffins galore. LOL … what was I thinking? There’s only two of us in the house. I think I’m either going to have to give away most of my baking of put it away in my already very packed freezer.